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

Spoilers: Season 4, episode 5

Author's Note: We're cruising quickly toward the end of this story, which makes me sad, but there's so much I love about the last few episodes, that I'm excited at the same time. I hope you enjoy this very angsty, angry chapter.

"We're fucked." It's the only conclusion that Holder has been able to come to. They didn't get the warrant for Col. Raine's car, and she's has been uncooperative, to put it mildly. Hostile would also be an understatement.

That's all he can say? We're fucked? Linden stares at him in disbelief. He's giving up? Just like that?

"Chamberlain is a St. George alum and a bigtime booster. Never gonna get that warrant."

"We're going to a different judge then," Linden insists stubbornly.

"You do that and both our careers are over." Holder can't believe she can't see reason. Then again, it wouldn't be the first time.

"We don't do that and we can't help Kyle." Linden can't believe he can't see reason. Then again, it wouldn't be the first time.

Is she serious? She wants to end her own career over one case? Well fuck that, because I don't! "Is he the only one you care about?"

They stare at each other with hostility, each completely unable to comprehend how the other can possibly not see their side.

"You see this fucking shitstorm we're right in the middle of, right?" Holder demands.

Linden looks at him as though she's disgusted with him, because she is. She'd never pegged him as a guy who would give up. It was one of the things she liked about him, that he was as dedicated as she was, at least most of the time. "Caroline's got you by the balls," she tells him. It's pathetic, she thinks.

He looks back at her, his expression challenging her. How can she say that, after all the times I've proven it to her? He tries to make her see it in his eyes as well as his words. "It's you and me, Linden. We're on the same team, remember?"

She looks at him coldly. "Are we?" I thought we were. But I don't know anymore, she thinks.

They just stare at each other. The look on his face says that he wonders if he knows her anymore. Even worse, he wonders if he ever really knew her at all. Maybe he was wrong about her all this time. She still looks disgusted with him.

Just then, at the moment when a distraction is most needed to diffuse the air between them before they say anything else that they'll regret, there's a knock on the door. Col. Raine has come to voluntarily turn over her car for their inspection. For the time being, both Linden and Holder are able to de-escalate their growing hostility towards each other as they focus their energy back on the case, instead of on hurting each other. For now.

…

Linden and Holder get out of the car, Linden from the driver's seat, locking the door and walking away. Holder follows her at a more leisurely pace. Col. Raine gave her alibi as her dance instructor. They don't like him, but he has given her a solid alibi.

"Between Two Buck Chuck's alibi and the security cameras at the Four Seasons, there's no way Margaret's the shooter. We're spinning our wheels, Linden." He knows it isn't what she'll want to hear, but it's the truth. He braces for the impact of her anger, which he fully expects to be directed at him.

She's already halfway across the parking lot ahead of him, but calls over her shoulder. "Just because she didn't pull the trigger doesn't mean she didn't give the order. She's got 250 toy soldiers at her disposal and all of them can't wait to kill." In her mind, there's no way Col. Raine's not guilty of something. It's so very obvious to her that she's lying to them. She stops and turns toward Holder, who's still walking towards her. "We've gotta get in there. Kyle's in trouble."

Holder's whole relaxed demeanor is part of what's pissing her off so much right now. It doesn't help when he tells her, "You're paranoid. This ain't 'Bombs Over Baghdad.'"

"Margaret could still try to kill him. She killed a child before, she'll do whatever it takes to protect herself." Linden is insistent that Kyle is in danger, that Margaret Raine has it in for him.

Holder just doesn't buy it, and he doesn't understand Linden's obsession with this. "If she wanted to kill him, he'd already be dead," he tells her matter-of-factly.

Linden looks away in frustration. Holder's standing right in front of her, their height difference glaringly obvious when he's this close. She takes half a step back, beyond frustrated with this man who she once understood so well. Or thought she did, anyway.

"How the fuck you know Kyle's so innocent? Maybe he's the one taking her orders. You ever consider that?" Holder had recently eased up on the idea that Kyle was the shooter, but that didn't mean it couldn't still be true.

"No, he's telling me the truth. I trust him. I can see it in his eyes. He's not the one lying to me." The remark cuts through the air between them, exactly as she meant it to. She's been waiting to say this for a while, and she can't keep it to herself anymore. She's glaring daggers at him, but that's only the beginning.

Holder is calm, too calm, when he asks her, "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

"I know what you said at the NA meeting." She tells him, her voice eerily calm. There, she said it. He's stunned, silent. Now let's see what he has to say for himself, she thinks. "You told everyone what we did."

They both pause, staring at each other. It's just a matter of who's going to break first.

Holder speaks first, as usual, his tone low and icy. "What we did?" he asks, then pauses to let his words sink in. "I didn't do anything. You're the one who did it. You're the one who couldn't keep your shit together. I was just trying to help you."

Whatever Holder's intention was, those words cut Linden somewhere deep inside, somewhere where she knows they won't come back from. This is it, she thinks. This is where we break, where we fracture, where our friendship dies. She's been waiting for it for a while now, knowing that it was inevitable. Because no matter what she does, good doesn't survive in her life. People don't last in her life. Sometimes it takes a while, but eventually, everyone leaves. It's one of the only things she knows for sure. It's all her fault, of course. It's always her fault.

She tries to cover the immeasurable pain that now floods her system with pure hostility. "Yeah well, thanks for all the help," she tells him bitterly, desperately. She has to push him away, has to, because the pain is too much. The pain of knowing that all that time that she trusted him, despite her best efforts, all that time she was wrong about him. I should have known, it's always the same. Why did I think this time would be different? That he would be different?

It just hurts too much.

"I told you to walk away… you wanted to stay," she tells him. Then, with more bitterness than she would ever have thought she could muster towards him, she adds, "I would've been a lot better off on my own." She knows that she's hurting him, but what surprises her is that she's hurting herself just as much, if not possibly more.

Her words hit Holder hard, as she had intended them to. He knows that he started it, that he lashed out at her first and that this is her, raising her defenses against him. He knows this, because he knows her. Or at least… he thought he knew her. Are they really doing this? Are they really turning on each other? It's as though he's watching a freight train speeding towards a building collapsed on the train tracks but is powerless to stop it. It's going to end badly, he knows, but there's nothing he can do now.

They can hear radio chatter in the background around them. Holder looks away for a second, then back at her, like he already regrets what he said.

"Look, I'm sorry, Linden. I fucked up, okay? I just felt like… the whole world was coming crashing down on me and I was about to explode." It's an inadequate excuse, and he knows it.

But now she's angry, and so wounded by his words, that his words aren't penetrating her newly formed defenses. She's not hearing him, not really. She won't let herself hear him. Now all she wants to do is hurt him the way he hurt her. "Yeah, well, I was wrong about you. You're just a fucking junkie like the rest of them."

He recoils, leaning back and breathing in, as if recovering from a punch.

She knows she's making it worse, but she's powerless to stop it, to stop the words from exploding out of her mouth. They know each other's weaknesses. That one punch was not enough for her. She needs to hit the other spot where she knows that it will hurt.

"Some kind of father you're gonna be." There, she thinks, a doubly whammy.

Holder takes it in stride. Oh, this is the game we're playing? He asks her silently. Alright, I can play this fucking game with you. He knows Linden, knows exactly how to get to her. Usually he uses this knowledge to help her. But not this time. "How's Jack doing, by the way? Weren't you supposed to take him to the airport right now?" Boom! He waits for her reaction, knows that her guilt over Jack is one of the things that will make her feel the worst.

Linden looks down at her watch and swears under her breath. "Shit!"

Holder can't resist rubbing it in just a little more, though, since they're working so hard at being assholes to each other. "Oh, snap, classic Linden, not giving a shit about anyone who's still alive, not even your own son."

She's looking up at him in shock now, too stunned to speak. Those words get through to her. She can't stop them, because she knows they're true.

"I'm the one who's fucked up?" he continues, "The only people you care about are dead."

He leans forward slightly, into her face, for emphasis, as he says the word, "dead." She walks away then, finally, breathing heavily, back across the street to her car. It's over, all of it. Them.

"Tell Little Man I said 'adios,'" Holder calls after her.

"Fuck you!" she yells at him as she goes. There's nothing else left that she can hurl at him now except profanities, but she is so, so hurt by and angry at this man, that she'll throw anything at him that she can.

"Yeah, fuck you too!" Holder yells back at her across the street.

Linden's so angry she can barely see. Holder was supposed to be her only friend in the world, and now he seems to be the one who has hurt her more than anyone else in the world. And all because she let him. She's angry with him, but even more than that, she's angry with herself. She has only herself to blame, and as usual, she turns all of her frustration inward.

I should have remembered, she berates herself as she drives away, everyone leaves.

…

Holder's standing in the church, the one where the nuns sing through the wall. The one where the music used to be beautiful, back when he was getting clean. Lately when he has gone there, it has just been noise, like he'd told Linden not too long ago. He's kept trying, though, unable to accept that the music is gone for good. It has to be something in his head that's stopping him from hearing it.

Today, though, he desperately needs to hear the music. He needs to feel like there's some chance that his life isn't fucked, because it really feels like that's what's happening. He'd worked so hard to get clean, so hard to do his job, to be the best cop he could be. He'd fucked up, sure, but he isn't a bad guy… or is he? Is he the fucked up asshole that Linden saw just now when she looked at him? She'd seen that guy because that was the guy he had acted like to her.

For almost as long as he'd known her, she had been the only one who hadn't seen the screw up, the junkie, the tweak-head, and now… now she saw that guy too. Everyone in the world couldn't be wrong, could they? He didn't want to be that guy, the one who disappointed everyone, who could do nothing but fuck up his own life and the lives of others… but if he wasn't that guy, then why was that all that anyone could see when they looked at him? He had let her down, he had let himself down… and he'd been a goddamn fucking asshole about it, to make it even better.

He'd hurt her intentionally, as much as he could, because… why? What the fuck was he hoping to accomplish? Because all he had accomplished was alienating Linden, and hurting her. No, not just hurting her. It was way past that point. He'd gone too far, even for his asshole self, and he knew it. He'd seen the look in her eyes. She might never forgive him. That wasn't what he wanted. None of this shit was what he'd wanted. All he'd ever tried to do was to help her. So then how did he manage to keep fucking it up so thoroughly, so completely? It seemed like the only thing he was good at these days was fucking up his own life… and now he'd… what? Fucked up Linden's life as a bonus?

He stands in the church, looking up to the ceiling, many stories above him, with the light filtering through the stained glass. He listens to the nuns singing, trying to hear the music, the beauty of it, but there's too much ugliness in his head, too much crap that's there because of him. He's lost and it's his own fault. He has let it all happen, and he deserves all the pain he's in now, he tells himself. So he stands up and walks toward the wall that the nuns stand behind as they sing, only their silhouettes visible through tiny holes. He's desperate, desperate to understand. He doesn't even know what he's trying to understand, all he knows it that he's lost.

"Where is he?" he demands over and over. He can't believe that God really means for any of this. He understands suffering, he knows that God works in mysterious ways, but this… where is He now? How can Holder possibly handle this when he feels that everyone, God included, has abandoned him? The nuns stop singing when Holder gets close, screaming, and they file out without a word. He starts crying as he repeats, over and over, "Where is he?"

Where does he go now? He leans his forehead against the wall, willing it all to stop. He needs someone, something, to hold onto. It's just all too much. He doesn't know how long he stands there, until the dull ache in his soul fades enough for him to move tiredly, mechanically, resignedly. He leaves the church and walks, without any real destination. Eventually he ends up at the station. When it comes down to it, there's still so much work to be done, and he's going to have to face it. The Stansbury case, and the fucked up mess with Skinner, too. Will he go down for that mess? He doesn't know. He almost doesn't care anymore, his exhaustion is so overpowering.

He walks down the hall, thankful to reach the bathroom without anyone stopping him, where he splashes cold water on his face.

The voice he hears behind him, the face he sees in the mirror when he looks up from the sink, well, it's one of the ones he least wants to see. He has no more emotion left to be angry, or annoyed, or frustrated, or intimidated by Reddick. He feels nothing as Reddick asks, almost begs, him to tell him the truth about what happened that night, with Skinner. Holder just stares at him. Back out in the hall, Reddick pats him on the back and tells him to call him.

Holder doesn't know how any of this will ever be alright, but he begs silently for help… because all he knows is that he's lost.