Executive Orders

CH 26 | Just Breathe

"Olivia?" Fitz's voice dropped to something soft, in a tone that questioned, didn't push but offered comfort.

Olivia turned to face him and the last barrier holding back the guilt and emotion that she'd struggled to hold together dissolved as she saw the worry, the concern - and the attempt to understand what was happening in his face.

How could she explain that when she couldn't understand it herself?

As she'd promised Harrison and Huck, Olivia had left OPA and gone back to her apartment, but they would never know that she'd found no peace there. Too many thoughts and too many memories kept tumbling through her mind.

She drew in a breath and it came out in a shuddering gasp...

First she tried taking a shower as a way of escape, turning up the heat and the pressure as high as she could, standing under the pounding spray until the hot water ran cold - and still it wasn't enough.

The air left her lungs and then it was a struggle to draw into another. Her nerves dance under her skin like an electric current...

Her body felt just as tense and knotted up as when she'd stepped into the shower as when she stepped out of it, her nerves stretched almost to the breaking point. Olivia brought her hands up to cover her eyes and felt them shaking. She shut her eyes trying to bury her thoughts but couldn't.

Another wave of sensation hit her; with her next breath the shaking was both inside and out, an almost painful itch she couldn't scratch, a tingling of pins and needles that she foolishly thought that she could drown in wine...

At the very least, she might find a path to a dreamless sleep - but not for the first time - before she was halfway through the first glass - Olivia knew that she'd find no answers in it tonight.

She fought it. Olivia drained her glass and then tried again, but as she tried to pour a second glass, her hands were shaking so badly that she spilled most of it, the splashes of crimson spattering across her hands like blood.

Her head pounded with too many memories...

In particular there was that one overriding, unwanted, hated voice that kept reverberating in her head, again and again and again, even as it unlocked the safe space in her mind, where all of her secrets were kept.

And then it was all just too much. The wall of false safety breached. Every sound, every silence crashed in on her, raked a painful path across her already over-stressed nerves like jagged fingernails against a chalkboard.

Revulsion at herself and the choices she's made floods her soul, overwhelming her as Olivia is forcibly reminded of every emotional lie that she's told in her past, the inner self-betrayals of every relationship she's ever had and could somehow never keep -

And then there was Defiance with its harvest of death and destruction surging up from deep inside her - drowning her in more guilt and self-loathing than she's allowed herself to feel in too long of a while - and then she's fleeing her apartment to the only true safe haven that she knows...

Olivia barely remembered getting in her car, let alone making her way to the White House and past the guards. When she came back to herself, she found herself sitting in her parking space, her heart hammering painfully in her chest, barely able to breathe except in great gasping sobs.

She has enough presence of mind to call Tom to come to her, knowing that she could trust him to hold her secrets.

When he arrives, one look at her stops any questions he might have asked, even when she begs him not to tell Fitz that she was there. She counted on the agent knowing without having to ask that she needed the time to - she didn't know - all Olivia knew was that she needed time.

Tom gave it to her. He escorted her to Fitz's bedroom, staying only long enough to light the fireplace and turn down the lights.

She never knew how long she stood there, staring out of a window, but seeing nothing. Hearing the sound of the fire dancing in the fireplace but feeling none of its warmth. Feeling instead the chill of her own thoughts - and those were bone-deep.

When he enters the room, she knows it instantly. First there was a wave of warmth that was all Fitz. But that only reminded her of all that he'd brought into her life - and all the wrongness she'd brought into his.

That revelation turns the chill inside her to ice.

Olivia can't help feeling it as it spread throughout her entire body until it very nearly chokes her. It freezes her into place.

"Livvie?"

She had to force herself to turn and face him, not knowing that the anguish she was feeling was something that Fitz could read oh so easily. All she saw was the emotion in his.

He's told her time and time again that there was nothing that she could do that he wouldn't forgive.

But she can't forgive herself. How is she supposed to forgive herself?

So even as Fitz took a step towards her, she unthinkingly took a step away, suddenly determined to keep an equal space between them.

"Livvie?"

She could hear the confusion in Fitz's voice - even worst, she could hear the compassion in his voice - even when he didn't know what she'd done.

"I-I lied to you." The words hurt her throat, as though she was were forcing their way through sharp shards of ice. It hurt.

She told him, in halting words, about the meeting in the garage, ending with "I'm so sorry that I didn't tell you."

It was nothing, Fitz tried to reassure her. There was no real harm done. "We can fix it."

"But who can fix me? Who can fix me?" Olivia's voice started rising. "I can't keep doing this - I can't keep hiding parts of myself from you -"

She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, but found no comfort there. "What's wrong with me?"

The words she's saying, the pain in her eyes shake Fitz. The way she stammers out her words as though she were deathly cold chills him. This isn't about her encounter in the garage, but something deeper. His heart aches, but he knows that it's nowhere near what his Livvie is feeling.

"Nothing, Livvie - there's nothing wrong with you - you're just human -" He hears what she's saying, but more than anything else, Fitz hears the tremble underlying her words. He wants nothing more than to find a way to take her pain away - but in this moment he feels helpless.

"There is something wrong with me, Fitz - I don't know what it is, but there is -"

"Livvie, no..."

She shakes her head as the words spilled from her helplessly. "There is - this has always been a part of who - of what - I am. I can't help it, I can't control it, it's like I was programmed this way -"

Something inside him reacted with painful empathy. Fitz knows all too well how that happens, what that kind of pressure feels like. He's never pushed Olivia about her past, knowing how little she's spoken of it in all the time that they've known one another - but he knows who had done their best to program him.

He won't ask her now, now is not the time for questions - not when Fitz can hear a level of desperation in her voice that he's never heard before. It's the genuine heartfelt grief in her voice that wrenches at his heart more than anything else. It sent a wave of goosebumps across his skin and brought a chill to both his heart and his gut.

If this was his reaction, Fitz could only imagine what this was doing to her...