Work Text:
You stand there I'm so afraid.
You said you knew me.
And I know what goes on when you're away.
It's the one place to lose me.
In too many people.
Too many people, so many people in this world.
Oil, canvas color.
Paint me a picture tonight.
(Beijing by Elliott)
[]
Blood is one of those tricky substances. It never completely washes away, and that’s one of the reasons they catch as many killers as they do. Because blood is stronger than guilt.
They give her a towel when the door shuts behind her, and she wipes at Melinda’s blood until her hands are only tacky and not wet. One of the lab techs shows her a sink and she scrubs quickly until she can see her skin again.
There are more shots inside, and she is barely breathing. The enemy is everybody in Sophie’s delusion.
She can hear through the door: Jo’s voice, Sophie’s husband, Elliot. The rise and fall of panic and concern.
When Elliot finally opens the door, Sophie cradles her dead son and Olivia makes a mental inventory of bullet holes in bodies. Zero.
She collapses a little.
[]
Putting a scalpel through Melinda’s ribs had been like stabbing an orange. Resistance at first, and she hadn’t wanted to push hard, but Melinda had cried out, ordered, and then Olivia had pushed harder, and the blade had slid past the skin and muscle and then fast like it was sinking in butter. And she’d had her fingers there, between Melinda’s ribs, worming their way into her pleura, leading the plastic tube that led the blood back out again, Melinda’s breath rushing back in.
She’s had far too much blood on her hands over the years. Even when she’s not being metaphorical.
[]
She has to stay at the scene to answer questions and give her statement, and Cragen texts from the hospital to tell them that Melinda will be okay.
Across the lobby, Elliot sits with Jo and they talk quietly, and Olivia heard enough through the door to know what they’re talking about. She feels oddly isolated in this room full of people. Friends even, not strangers.
Elliot doesn’t look at her, not even when he looks up, and his hand is on Jo’s shoulder in that reassuring way he has. When he can’t not touch someone.
It isn’t that she’s jealous, exactly; so much as she’s… disappointed. In herself? In the situation. She’s not sure.
She and Elliot have traveled a strange road. Each year she realizes there are things he hasn’t told her. It’s hard not to feel resentful.
Eleven years and people still don’t believe they aren’t sleeping together. She no longer knows what to tell them. Physically they have never, but if mind-fucking is considered cheating, then they are soaked in sin and irrefutably damned.
Across the room, Jo smiles at him. Olivia rubs tiredly at the center of her forehead.
She smells copper on her hands, and when she looks, she sees a crimson road map tangled delicately between her fingers. Skin with all its crevices and folds, blood with its staying power. Melinda’s life will not be washed quickly away. It will take days of wear to rub it off.
She swallows and realizes she is shaking.
[]
When she went to Ryan’s funeral last year, his parents smiled at her with a spark of recognition that surprised her. “Oh,” his mother said. “You’re that Olivia!”
And she was sort of touched that Ryan used to talk about her sometimes, that she’d been a positive influence in his job. His service was filled with aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, and it got to her in a way that even his dead body hadn’t. He had all of that, all those connections and those people who loved him.
It was watching all of them that made her tear up during the eulogy.
[]
She thinks about leaving Elliot sometimes. That maybe it would be easier.
After his son sat across from her in an interview room and asked, “Ever sleep with your partner, Detective?”
Elliot can’t seem to pull himself away from her, so maybe she should do it for him.
Of course she tried that once before…
[]
“Hey,” he says, and he’s using that raspy, soft tone that always sends a shiver up her spine. He leans against the wall next to her.
“Is she okay?” Olivia asks. She likes Jo, most of the time.
He nods. “Yeah,” he says. “You should talk. I think she’d like to hear from you.”
Olivia nods too. “Later.” She needs to feel the ground under her feet again first.
“Are you okay?”
She looks at him, sees the guarded concern in his eyes. She’d been in that room too. She almost forgot. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m fine. No one died.” Except of course, for one kidnapper and one little boy.
She looks away, and Elliot leans over so he’s in her line of vision and then his hand is on her shoulder, that same hand that had Jo in his grip, and she can’t help it. She pulls away from him.
“Olivia,” he says.
“I’m fine,” she says, but her voice breaks.
She lifts her fingers, touches her neck like she’s protecting herself, but then she remembers what lives between the ridges of her palm now.
She yanks her hand down.
“Liv,” he says, and he’s crowding her suddenly, his voice gone low. His hand is on her shoulder again and the other is touching her hair and then his body is pushing her back and she’s confused until a door opens behind her and he pushes her in and then follows and she turns as he locks the door.
They’re in a small room, like a doctor’s office, and there’s a sink and a chair and a table, and he hasn’t let go of her arm.
He turns on the water and he grabs her hands and he puts them under the faucet. It’s cold, and he adjusts it before he starts rubbing her skin, working the blood off. She has a lump in her throat and her eyes burn as she watches his hands on hers.
His breath is heavy in her ear and her hip is pressed between his legs as he leans them both over the sink. He uses soap and their hands slide together, slick and warm and with the scent of oranges. His thumb nail works to scrape off the stubborn spots and the pads of his fingers rub over and over at her cuticles, and she feels herself getting cleaner.
When he’s done she leans wearily against the wall, facing him, and he grabs handfuls of paper towels from a dispenser and dries each finger. She keeps her gaze on what he’s doing and not on his eyes.
His hands are in her hair then, and it feels like too much, so she turns her head and she says, “I’m okay.” And he hesitates, but then he wets one of the paper towels and he grabs her chin gently and she feels the wet paper mopping at her cheek, and she realizes she must have blood on her face.
That’s a little too much and she can’t stop the tears then, as much as she fights. He just wipes it all away with the paper towel and his thumbs.
He still hasn’t said anything, but his breathing is so loud…
He wipes at her cheek, her forehead, down between her collarbones. Then he wipes her neck, and his fingers brush her throat and pause there, one fingertip running in a line across her skin, and she remembers Culross putting his arm around her neck, squeezing tight, the way her vision went black as the blood was cut off.
Then Elliot’s worried face above her as she’d come back to life.
She takes a deep, shaky breath and lets it out slowly. His fingers are still on her neck, his heat is surrounding her. “Warner’s going to be okay,” she says, not sure if he’s heard.
He shifts and makes a low sound of agreement and he’s so, so close. “So are you,” he says quietly.
He’s pressing in, and his hand is in her hair and his lips are brushing her forehead, and she can smell his skin, and her hands lift automatically to his waist and curl into his shirt. He disarms her when he does this, and he makes her feel weak. Maybe she makes herself feel weak.
She nods and says, “Yeah. I’m fine. You can go back to her now.” Back to Jo, back to Kathy, back to everyone who’s not her.
“It’s you I’m worried about,” he says, quietly, and she still isn’t looking at him.
She shakes her head then, staring to the side at the sink, frowning slightly, trying to look fine but her fingers are trembling against his waist. “I… I don’t…”
He leans into her, one hand sliding up, his palm over her forehead, brushing her hair back, pressing her head back against the wall, forcing her gaze up so she has to look at him. “Olivia,” he rasps.
And he can’t possibly realize how it crushes her to look at him like this. How his blue eyes cut her open. How she forgets herself in the face of his dedication and protection, forgets who she even is. How she hates him and loves him and wants to run far away and never leave.
“You’re okay,” he says, and his voice drips with insistence and relief and with the utter belief that she has to be, because if she isn’t then neither is he and if they start crumbling now they might never stop.
She looks at him and feels every year of those eleven bottled up inside of her. She sees them reflected back. And she gives in then and lets him pull her in. She leans in and hardens her skin and she plunges the knife in her own chest and bleeds all over him.
So much that he’ll never be clean.
~end~