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When you're drowning and your breath stutters, lungs aching and hands pounding at the sheen of ice slowly numbing your body, you grab the only thing that keeps you from dying. Even if it burns your hands, even if it digs into the flesh of your fingers leaving scars going down to the bone. You grab on and you haul yourself out and you find a reason to breathe.
You'd think fire would hurt. That you would be helpless in the mouth of flames. A moth with its small fluttering wings singed by fire, but no. It was water. It was water pouring down your throat and it was hard to think you were ever going to taste air again. Fire was light and fire was warmth. It was water that froze your soul.
Sometimes, love is a shard of ice buried agonizingly deep into your gut; sometimes love is a bonfire charring you down to a heap of ashes.
(you're not sure which you prefer, and you suppose it doesn't matter as long as it kills you in the end)
The car is so cold but you don't dare turn the key and bring to life the ignition. Cold keeps you on edge, on attention. Cold is not ice but it's sobering. You deserve it. There are few things you deserve, certainly not love, but this, yes.
The thing about loving Quinn – or is it Lindsay, it was Linsday? No, no she chose to be Quinn – the thing about loving Quinn is knowing you could, you would, kill her in a heartbeat if the need arose. You aren't sure if that's love at all, but it's the closest you've ever come that you can remember. Maybe once you loved and it wasn't like this, it wasn't timed and limited, it wasn't with its own condition.
Killing Quinn would be a fucking pleasure. You pretend you don't dream of it sometimes, pretend that you don't want to get off on it. You pretend you've never had a vision of Quinn splayed out under you with her hands tied up and her small lips trembling, eyes wide and wet.
Clocks tick like thunder in the sky; the numbers of digital watches blink like lightning.
7:52.
You realize something in your pocket needs attention. It takes a moment's struggle to coordinate your body enough to take action.
The buzzing of your phone is a comfort. You don't much like silence anymore. Maybe, you think, you did once like it. It was soothing. But now, it reminds you too much of being alone, being isolated, of being in the ho—
No. You don't like silence.
You let the phone ring for a few more seconds before you reach out to check who it is.
Your hands are trembling. Are your hands trembling? It's hard to tell sometimes, when your eyes can't focus and everything is moving anyway, nothing is stable, nothing is stagnant, nothing is still. You might be drunk. That whiskey you keep telling strangers about. But whiskey doesn't taste nearly as good as warm blood feels spilling across clean floors, an awning, a quivering vein slit open right in the middle just so.
(stop thinking)
The screen reads: Olivia Pope.
The closest thing to a savior, to the person who can put the pieces back in order, is a woman who doesn't even know where her own pieces belong.
Olivia looks unhappy now. She used to look happy, once, a long time ago. When she was a nobody waiting for a train. Olivia looked into your eyes, perhaps the first time you had ever looked into anyone's eyes after – after—
No.
No.
(there is no before and there is no after and there is no after)
God, you're fucking falling apart.
When Olivia calls, you come. Her voice is like silk over the phone, like a warm blanket when you haven't slept in four days and the only thing left is staring into the window of a family preparing for bed, mother rubs Olay lotion on her hands, father watches half an hour of news not a minute more not a minute less, daughter drinks warm milk two sugars, son texts well into the night.
Olivia helped you feel again.
(you don't feel, you don't, there are rules, there are protocols, you don't)
7:52.
There are no happy endings.
There is blood on your hands and Olivia Pope is calling your phone, and it's not even a choice anymore. It's a compulsion, it's a collar around your neck that is choking and suffocating until your vision goes dark but if you take it off, you'll miss it even more than you miss the warmth of your wife and the smell of your son – the family you don't remember because it's a family you never had.
Olivia's all you have now. And if she asks for blood, you will claw the skin off your bones, you will bring your sharpest knives, you will spill as much as she needs without hestiation or question.
You answer the phone.