author's note; set post-Rage, although there's not too much focused on the episode, think of it more as setting the scene and as reference. enjoy. -breigh.

I.

He talked about control like it was a choice or a decision or something that he had willed himself into and his knuckles bled his regret and his mind was folded and contorted and holding back his memories, pieces of the past laced together with the lie of tomorrow.

Control for him was nothing more than a line of coincidentals, a series of left turns instead of rights and he stood now at the end of a road that was nothing more than the beginning of a circle because whoever said that you leave anything behind was a liar.

He felt like the surf, the jagged edges of the water when a storm kissed it's surface with a rough assault. He was being scattered into the clouds above and the sand below and there was no controlling the sea.

He took the stairs to her apartment two at a time and he didn't pause before knocking because he was a maniac and she made him that way. He said he was under control, but the only control that he could find was his lack there of.

"Elliot." Her breath caught in her throat when she answered, and he would have noted it but he couldn't because he had to tell her that he was lost before she could figure it out for herself and start the expedition to bring him home. With his controls falling away he was open and vulnerable and he was in the middle of life and death and he didn't know if be believed that he was living or dying and he needed her to affirm something.

"I couldn't go home." He didn't wait for her to invite him in, but pushed passed aggressively and stood behind her in the silence of their death.

"What happened to you?" The blood came from his knuckles like rivers of betrayal and Elliot shook his head to say no. She moved closer to him, reaching her hand to him slowly, but he brushed her away, but stayed silent.

He couldn't look at her because tonite everything that they were controlled by was strangling him and making him see that life was a lie and death was a promise and he wondered if people really lived, or if they just tricked themselves into it and were instead dying the whole time.

Elliot Stabler, the uncontrolled cynic.

He couldn't see the fear that she was wrapped in – wrapped so tight that she couldn't breath or love or live without pains in her chest and the slowing of her heart that reminded her of her mortality in such areas.

He prayed for her sometimes because he knew that she would not do it for herself, that she would not let herself believe in another intangible object in her world of phantoms, and he would pray for everything that she would not let herself be.

While Elliot had been playing in his brain, playing in the sandbox made from ashes of all the mistakes he'd ever burnt, Olivia had asked if he was okay, asked what had happened, if he wanted to talk, but Elliot Stabler could not let her know that this was broken and this was tearing and this was lost.

He was out of definition now, and Olivia stained the places that he had fallen into with his thoughts of how different he could have been and how different she could have been and how the things that really controlled him were his secrets and lies and ultimately himself and how it worked the same for Olivia.

He was too proud to call this a self-induced midlife crisis, so he counted one more lie and continued to play in his ashes, and when he came back to where he was and why he was there he noticed that Olivia had retreated to the couch, where she sat watching him, a pillow clenched within her arms, resting atop her flat stomach.

He swallowed the demons that held them for the negative possibilities.

"Elliot, I'm worried about you," her voice was soft. Elliot let the weight of his head fall and his head tilted back, his eyes pinched closed as he was blinded to what was above him and avoiding what was below as he took her words.

"You think I'm a maniac, Liv? Crazy, out of control, nuts?"

"Elliot," her voiced was laced with a hint of shock, and Elliot wondered if she was humoring him.

He looked back to her as she squeezed the pillow closer to her stomach, and he turned away sharply, in his sandbox of ashes there were castles now, castles that represented that which would fall away and that which was impermeable and that which appeared to be neither.

"No, Olivia," he growled, "he just – he got into my head and he got me thinking and we're just a pile of people controlled by everything and everyone and what we thought was ours is nothing more than someone else's."

"You don't believe that." She knew by the look in his eyes that he did.

"You start thinking about everything you do, Olivia, and you start thinking about why you do it and I have no fucking clue what decisions I've made and what decisions were made for me." She didn't answer because she had no words, they were lost with Elliot's idealism and he walked slowly over to the coffee table and sat in front of her, letting his head fall to his hands. "I love my family so much, but there are days, Olivia, when you get lost thinking about what could have…" He trailed off because he couldn't finish, and Olivia reached for him. "Don't touch me, please," his voice wasn't hard or rough, but rather scared and each world crumbled like stone as it fell from his lips.

This wasn't falling in love with her, this was tumbling - leaving a trail of ruins as he rolled through and left a path of dust that had once been memories.

This was giving the control of society, of the promise he'd made to his wife and to god and to his family away, and this was standing before her with lack of any sanity.

"Elliot, what has gotten into you?" She was molded into what everyone had made her and he was nauseous because of what she could have been if she wasn't so petrified of it.

"Don't act like you're not scare to wake up tomorrow, too, Olivia." He got up off of the coffee table and walked to the far corner, Olivia not able to move from the storm that had just blindsided her.

Elliot was thunder and lighting and torrential downpours and she was standing within it all trying to soak something up in the whirlwind of his mind.

"What are you trying to say?"

"Everything I've done has been because I was controlled by something, whether I knew it or not. I love my wife and I love my kids and I love the home that I made with them, but I know that I will regret the things that I don't do more than any of the things that I have." He turned to her sharply, and she closed her eyes to stay away from the blue in his.

"Love is control, Elliot. You will never be –"

"No, Olivia, no, that's where you're wrong - love is not control. Love is giving up control," he corrected her, but his body ached because he knew that that was the one thing that she had never allowed herself to give up.

"Elliot, if you want to talk about Kathy and the kids and –"

"You never had kids, Olivia, because your father is still controlling you. He's playing with you and he's changing you even though you've never even fucking known him." He was boiling red and Olivia noticed this through the wall of tears that her eyes had built.

This was a line he rarely ever crossed, but tonite he went running past.

"You say things, sometimes, Olivia, about how you can't do it because of what could be – that's control. That control he gave you, that's not love. Do you know what you're about to give up?" He wanted to make her better and lace her back together and take away every piece of anything that controlled her.

He wanted to set her free.

"I am controlled and you are controlled and I can't even look at you for all that we've lost to that." He was crying now, and Olivia was sobbing because this was a reality that she had ignored and this was Elliot throwing it at her without her having any place to hide.

His knuckles were bleeding so that she could see, but his knees were scrapped and his hands were scuffed because he had tripped and he had stumbled and he had fallen and he had tumbled into loving her and he didn't know when it happened and he didn't know why it happened but tonite he was not under control and tonite he was the key and she was locked so tight that he needed to pull it open amongst rusted lies.

"What are you doing, Elliot?" She choked the words out.

"I'm thinking about everything I've never done. About ever adventure I let slide away; about every place I've never seen. And then I let myself think about the same for you," he started breathing heavily and turned around, punching a hole into the wall, removing his hand, now covered in blood and cuts and Olivia jumped up immediately.

"Jesus Christ, Elliot," She was behind him, her hand on his shoulder, but he ducked away from her touch for a moment as he turned to face her.

"Everything can control me, but I can't control anything – not even this," he was conflicted as he put his bloodied hand to her face, everything that was inside of him coming to rest on her check.

"So what do you want, Elliot? You want to go on some adventure you never could? You want to run to some beach you've never seen? Taste the salt in an ocean you've never touched?"

"I want to take everything that you let go and bring it back to you. Control is fear and I don't want that to be part of what I see in you, Olivia." He was bitter and blind and robbed of freedom.

"But you, what do you want?"

"I'm lost." He looked Olivia over, and she crumpled herself up and took herself away from his eyes, feeling as if she was his torn and tattered map and she left him alone to wander the globe.

He clenched his jaw and then moved quickly to the couch and grabbed the pillow that Olivia had been clutching earlier before running back to her and locking eyes with her.

"I used to think it was so good to be controlled, but now, when I look at it, I'm tame, but I'm lost." He shook his head, "you're safe, Olivia, but at what cost? You don't have to face what could have been but you're locked in what was. I see you, your eyes, your heart, your soul, I see it and I see you wearing it at moments when you'd rather not."

"I'm fine, Elliot, I don't feel controlled –"

"You are controlled by his ghost, by what he did and what is still inside of you and what never will be." He moved to her and pulled her tight fitting black shirt out from her body, sliding the pillow up under her shirt and she dropped her hands to her sides, the pillow feeling as if it were sewn together by fiberglass, little pieces that cut her as they slid against her flat stomach.

She didn't move and she didn't breath and Elliot looked at his play masterpiece in his play life and he fell to his knees.

"Don't tell me you haven't lost anything. Don't tell me this isn't a crossroad and don't tell me that you're not crying fear." He shook his head.

"Take it out." She couldn't fade into this illusion with him, fade into her rounded stomach and Elliot's relinquishing control to her and she couldn't let him be right, even though she knew with each part of her that he was.

"Look at you, look at this. Don't fear life, Olivia. Don't fear what you could give someone else because it would be nothing less than everything." At that moment, Elliot was selling her her own morality, she was buying her humanity and she felt life and death and calm and fear and she needed to stop pretending.

"I can't have this, please, Elliot, please, please, just – Elliot!" She screamed, and he pulled the pillow from under her shirt, but she still felt its presence as he pulled her to the floor with him.

"I don't want to hurt you, I just want you to see this, I just want to make you not be afraid," he collected her into his arms and she burrowed into him.

"I'm scared to wake up tomorrow, Elliot," she admitted through her tears, breathing the words into Elliot's neck, and he squeezed her for a quick moment.

He needed to change something and someone and he needed to make this better but he was lost and she was crumbling and he had just given his control to his crumbling religion.

to be continued.